Lydia Davis famous quotes

Do what you want to do, and don't worry if it's a little odd or doesn't fit the market.
-- Lydia Davis

#Worry #Want #Littles

Nearly every morning, a certain woman in our community comes running out of her house with her face white and her overcoat flapping wildly. She cries out, "Emergency, emergency," and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed. We know she is making it up; nothing is has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who has no been moved at some time to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our strength, and even the strength of our friends and families, too, to keep us quiet.
-- Lydia Davis

#Running #Morning #Taken

You know the pain is part of the whole thing. And it isn’t that you can say afterwards the pleasure was greater than the pain and that’s why you would do it again. That has nothing to do with it. You can’t measure it, because the pain comes after and it lasts longer. So the question really is, Why doesn’t that pain make you say, I won’t do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don’t.
-- Lydia Davis

#Pain #Lasts #Pleasure

If you think of something, do it. Plenty of people often think, “I’d like to do this, or that.
-- Lydia Davis

#Thinking #People #Terror

Like a tropical storm, I, too, may one day become ‘better organized.
-- Lydia Davis

#Storm #One Day #May

I find teaching - I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult.
-- Lydia Davis

#Teaching #Students #Classroom

If I was writing about an academic or a more difficult person, I would use the Latinate vocabulary more, but I do think Anglo-saxon is the language of emotion.
-- Lydia Davis

#Writing #Thinking #Vocabulary

Samuel Johnson Is Indignant:that Scotland has so few trees.
-- Lydia Davis

#Scotland #Tree #Indignant

the translator, a lonely sort of acrobat, becomes confused in a labyrinth of paradox, or climbs a pyramid of dependent clauses and has to invent a way down from it in his own language.
-- Lydia Davis

#Lonely #Confused #Pyramids

In some sense the text and the translator are locked in struggle - 'I attacked that sentence, it resisted me, I attacked another, it eluded me' - a struggle in which, curiously, when the translator wins, the text wins too ...
-- Lydia Davis

#Struggle #Winning #Sentences

I attempt all day, at work, not to think about what lies ahead, but this costs me so much effort that there is nothing left for my work. I handle telephone calls so badly that after a while the switchboard operator refuses to connect me. So I had better say to myself, Go ahead and polish the silverware beautifully, then lay it out ready on the sideboard and be done with it. Because I polish it in my mind all day long—this is what torments me (and doesn't clean the silver).
-- Lydia Davis

#Lying #Thinking #Long

The moment when a limit is reached, when there is nothing ahead but darkness: something comes in to help that is not real. Another way all this is like madness: a mad person not helped out of his trouble by anything real begins to trust what is not real because it helps him and he needs it because real things continue not to help him.
-- Lydia Davis

#Real #Mad #Darkness

We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.
-- Lydia Davis

#Memories #Character #Ongoing

We feel an affinity with a certain thinker because we agree with him; or because he shows us what we were already thinking; or because he shows us in a more articulate form what we were already thinking; or because he shows us what we were on the point of thinking; or what we would sooner or later have thought; or what we would have thought much later if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have been likely to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have liked to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now.
-- Lydia Davis

#Thinking #Affinity #Form

The translator ... Peculiar outcast, ghost in the world of literature, recreating in another form something already created, creating and not creating, writing words that are his own and not his own, writing a work not original to him, composing with utmost pains and without recognition of his pains or the fact that the composition really is his own.
-- Lydia Davis

#Pain #Writing #Creating

Often, the idea that there can be a wide range of translations of one text doesn't occur to people - or that a translation could be bad, very bad, and unfaithful to the original.
-- Lydia Davis

#Ideas #People #Unfaithful

I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing - I'm always searching for multiple ways to say things.
-- Lydia Davis

#Writing #Thinking #Pay

I never dream in French, but certain French words seem better or more fun than English words - like 'pois chiches' for chick peas!
-- Lydia Davis

#Dream #Fun #Peas

But it is curious how you can see that an idea is absolutely true and correct and yet not believe it deeply enough to act on it.
-- Lydia Davis

#Believe #Ideas #Enough

Why don't you like the foods I like?" he asks sometimes. "Why don't you like the foods I make?" I answer.
-- Lydia Davis

#Answers #Sometimes

Art is not in some far-off place.
-- Lydia Davis

#Art #Art Is

I can talk for a long time only when it's about something boring.
-- Lydia Davis

#Long #Boring

So the question really is, Why doesn't that pain make you say, I won't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don't.
-- Lydia Davis

#Pain

There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn to love a person while continuing to be selfish.
-- Lydia Davis

#Giving Up #Selfish #Choices

No one is calling me. I can’t check the answering machine because I have been here all this time. If I go out, someone may call while I’m out. Then I can check the answering machine when I come back in.
-- Lydia Davis

#Machines #Calling #May

To observe the world carefully, to write a lot and often, on a schedule if necessary, to use the dictionary a lot, to look up word origins, to analyze closely the work of writers you admire, to read not only contemporaries but writers of the past, to learn at least one foreign language, to live an interesting life outside of writing.
-- Lydia Davis

#Writing #Past #Interesting

Maybe the truth does not matter, but I want to know it if only so that I can come to some conclusions about such questions as: whether he is angry with me or not; if he is, then how angry; whether he still loves me or not; if he does, then how much; whether he loves me or not; how much; how capable he is of deceiving me in the act and after the act in the telling.
-- Lydia Davis

#Breakup #Matter #Doe

I looked like a woman in glasses, but I had dreams of leading a very different kind of life, the life of a woman who would not wear glasses, the kind of woman I saw from a distance now and then in a bar.
-- Lydia Davis

#Dream #Distance #Glasses

Heart weeps. Head tries to help heart. Head tells heart how it is, again: You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday. Heart feels better, then. But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart. Heart is so new to this. I want them back, says heart. Head is all heart has. Help, head. Help heart.
-- Lydia Davis

#Heart #Feel Better #Long

I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.
-- Lydia Davis

#Character #Creating #Narrative

My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.
-- Lydia Davis

#Meditation #Stories #Littles

I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating 'Swann's Way.' There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences.
-- Lydia Davis

#Writing #Two #Long

I would recommend, definitely, developing a 'day job' that you like - don't expect to make money writing!
-- Lydia Davis

#Jobs #Writing #Making Money

I do see an interest in writing for Twitter. While publishers still do love the novel and people do still like to sink into one, the very quick form is appealing because of the pace of life.
-- Lydia Davis

#Writing #People #Pace

I am basically the sort of person who has stage-fright teaching. I kind of creep into a classroom. I'm not an anecdote-teller, either, although I often wish I were.
-- Lydia Davis

#Teaching #Wish #Anecdotes

I don't pare down much. I write the beginning of a story in a notebook and it comes out very close to what it will be in the end. There is not much deliberateness about it.
-- Lydia Davis

#Notebook #Writing #Stories